Tagopen rate

About the Apple thing

A lot of folks are talking about Apple’s recent announcement about building privacy protection into email. I have somewhat stayed out of the conversation and I’m not sure what I really think about it. This is a change to how a lot of folks use email and no one really likes change. I actually have a post I’ve been quietly working on talking about open rates. From my perspective...

Stop obsessing about open rates

In 2020: 250OK says open rates were much lower than ESPs report. The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates. A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings discussing how...

Forget about engagement, think inboxing

While answering a question about how to improve IP reputation at Gmail I realized that I no longer treat Gmail opens as anything about how a user is interacting with email. There are so many cases and ways that a pixel load can be triggered, without the user actually caring about the mail that it’s not a measure of the user at all. That doesn’t mean opens are useless. In fact...

Oh, Microsoft

Things have been a little unsettled at Microsoft webmail properties over the last few months. A number of ESPs reported significantly increased deferrals from Microsoft properties starting sometime late in November. Others saw reduced open rates across their customer base starting in late October. More recently, people are noticing higher complaint rates as well as an increase in mail being...

Implied permission

Codified into law in CASL, implied permission describes the situation where a company can legally mail someone. The law includes caveats and restrictions about when this is a legitimate assumption on the part of the company. It is, in fact, a kludge. There isn’t such a thing as implied permission. Someone either gives you permission to send them email or they don’t. We use the term...

Ask Laura: Does changing ESPs hurt deliverability?

  Dear Laura, We’re a small ESP and as we onboard new clients, we often hear them ask “Why did I get better open rates with our previous provider? There has to be something wrong with your platform!” As part of the onboarding process, we meet with new clients to provide best practices and let them know they are building a reputation with ISPs on new IPs. We talk about how algorithms are...

Monitoring Your Mail Stream

One of the most important things for any mail sender to do is monitor their mail stream. There are a number of things that every mailer should pay attention to.  Some are things to monitor during delivery, some are things to monitor after delivery. All of these things tell senders important information about how their mail is being received by their recipients and the ISPs. What to monitor during...

What is an open?

I was having a discussion today with a few industry colleagues about engagement and open rates. It was a good discussion and inspired a couple blog posts. Engagement totally matters, Engagement affects deliverability, and ISPs should be the last of your concerns. I think they’ve covered the engagement issue pretty well, but what I wanted to talk about was metrics, specifically opens. Open...

Meaningless metrics

I’ve been having some conversations with fellow delivery folks about metrics and delivery and bad practices. Sometimes, a sender will have what appear to be good metrics, but really aren’t getting them through any good practices. They’re managing to avoid the clear indicators of bad practices (complaints, SBL listings, blocks, etc), but only because the metrics aren’t good...

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